I have known many laboring men that have got good estates in this valley.— Bunyan Sunbeams, shadows, butterflies, and birds.— Wordsworth   Copyright, 1889, By BRADFORD TORREY. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co....

The writer of this little book has found so much pleasure in other men's woods and fields that he has come to look upon himself as in some sort the owner of them. Their lawful possessors will not begrudge him this feeling, he believes, nor take it amiss if he assumes, even in this public way, to hold a rambler's lease of their property. Should it please them to do so, they may accept the papers herein contained as a kind of return, the best he knows how to offer, for the many favors, alike unpro

Yet some did think that he had little business here.— Wordsworth. Every autumn the town of W—— sends me a tax-bill, a kindly remembrance for which I never fail of feeling grateful. It is pleasant to know that after all these years there still remains one man in the old town who cherishes my memory,—though it be only "this publican." Besides, to speak frankly, there is a measure of satisfaction in being reminded now and then of my dignity as a landed proprietor. One may be never so rich in stocks

James Russell Lowell. It is one of the enjoyable features of bird study, as in truth it is of life in general, that so many of its pleasantest experiences have not to be sought after, but befall us by the way; like rare and beautiful flowers, which are never more welcome than when they smile upon us unexpectedly from the roadside. One May morning I had spent an hour in a small wood where I am accustomed to saunter, and, coming out into the road on my way home again, fell in with a friend. "Would

Methinks here one may, without much molestation, be thinking what he is, whence he came, what he has done, and to what the King has called him.— Bunyan. I fall in with persons, now and then, who profess to care nothing for a path when walking in the woods. They do not choose to travel in other people's footsteps,—nay, nor even in their own,—but count it their mission to lay out a new road every time they go afield. They are welcome to their freak. My own genius for adventure is less highly devel

Shakespeare. Let it be said at the outset that the seeker after bird's-nests is never without plenty of company, of one sort and another. For instance, I was out early one cloudy morning last spring, when I caught sight of a handsome black and white animal nosing his way through the bushes on one side of the path. He had come forth on the same errand as myself; and I thought at once of the veery's nest, for which I had been looking in vain, but which could not be far from the very spot where my

Thus, without theft, I reap another's field.— Sidney Lanier. I was passing some days of idleness in a shallow Vermont valley, situated at an elevation of fifteen or sixteen hundred feet, circled by wooded hills, and intersected by an old turnpike, which connects the towns near Lake Champlain with the region beyond the mountains. Small farmhouses stood here and there along the highway, while others were scattered at wide intervals over the lower slopes of the outlying hills. With all the brightne

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.— Matthew Arnold. Nothing is seen until it is separated from its surroundings. A man looks at the landscape, but the tree standing in the middle of the landscape he does not see until, for the instant at least, he singles it out as the object of vision. Two men walk the same road; as far as the bystander can perceive, they have before them the same sights; but let them be questioned at the end of the journey, and it will appear that one man saw one s

I looked forward to the month with peculiar interest, as it was many years since I had passed a November in the country, and now that it is over I am moved to publish its praises: partly, as I hope, out of feelings of gratitude, and partly because it is an agreeable kind of originality to commend what everybody else has been in the habit of decrying. In the first place, then, it was a month of pleasant weather; something too much of wind and dust (the dust for only the first ten days) being almo

While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.— Thoreau. Those who will have us all to be studying the Sacred Books of the East, and other such literature, are given to laying it down as an axiom that whoever knows only one religion knows none at all,—an assertion, I am bound to acknowledge, that commends itself to my reason, notwithstanding the somewhat serious inferences fairly deducible from it touching the nature and worth of certain convictio

I will go lose myself.— Shakespeare. There are two sayings of Scripture which to my mind seem peculiarly appropriate for pleasant Sundays,—"Behold the fowls of the air," and "Consider the lilies." The first is a morning text, as anybody may see, while the second is more conveniently practiced upon later in the day, when the dew is off the grass. With certain of the more esoteric doctrines of the Bible (the duty of turning the other cheek, for example, or of selling all that one has and giving to

Emerson. In outward, every-day affairs, in what we foolishly call real life, man is a stickler for regularity, a devout believer in the maxim, "Order is heaven's first law." He sets his house at right angles with the street; lays out his grounds in the straightest of straight lines, or in the most undeviating of curves; selects his shade-trees for their trim, geometrical habit; and, all in all, carries himself as if precision and conformity were the height of virtue. Yet this same man, when he c

I walk about; not to and from.— Charles Lamb. Taking a walk is something different from traveling afoot. The latter I may do when on my way to the cars or the shop; but my neighbor, seeing me at such times, never says to himself, "Mr. —— is taking a walk." He knows I cannot be doing that, so long as I am walking for the sake of getting somewhere. Even the common people understand that utilitarianism has nothing to do with the true peripatetic philosophy. The disciples of this philosophy, the nob

It happened to me once to spend a long summer afternoon under a linden-tree, reading "Middlemarch." The branches were loaded with blossoms, and the heavy perfume attracted the bees from far and near, insomuch that my ears were all the time full of their humming. Butterflies also came, though in smaller numbers, and silently. Whenever I looked up from my book I was sure to find at least one or two fluttering overhead. They were mostly of three of our larger sorts,—the Turnus, the Troilus, and the

Shakespeare. At the back of my father's house were woods, to my childish imagination a boundless wilderness. Little by little I ventured into them, and among my earliest recollections of their sombre and lonesome depths was a long, thunderous, far-away drumming noise, beginning slowly and increasing in speed till the blows became almost continuous. This, somebody told me, was the drumming of the partridge. Now and then, in open spaces in the path, I came upon shallow circular depressions where t

Agassiz, Alexander and Elizabeth C. Seaside Studies in Natural History. Illustrated. 8vo, $3.00. Agassiz, Prof. Louis. Methods of Study in Natural History. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. Geological Sketches. First Series. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. Geological Sketches. Second Series. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. Bailey, Prof. L. H., Jr. Talks Afield, about Plants and the Science of Plants. With 100 Illustrations. 16mo, $1.00. Bamford, Mary E. Up and Down the